The year has seen a great deal of software development in support of magnetic symmetry and various types of magnetic structural analysis, examples being FULPROF, JANA, the Bilbao Crystallographic Server, and the ISOTROPY suite. As these tools continue to develop and interact, the importance of the pending magnetic CIF standard is growing.

In 2013, the commission continued the difficult work of establishing standards for describing a magnetic structure, and for relating the three most common descriptions of a magnetic structure: the supercell description, the wave description, and the representational (group-theoretical) description. If treated in a fully general way, these descriptions are entirely interconvertable. But a given magnetic structure may be much easier to describe in a non-general way using just one of them. The commission is preparing a manuscript on this topic.

The book Magnetic Group Tables, authored by commission member Daniel Litvin, and formally reviewed by the commission, was published by the IUCr in 2013, and is made freely available at http://www.iucr.org/publ/978-0-9553602-2-0 as part of the celebration of the 2014 International Year of Crystallography.

Near the end of the year, the commission created a new website at http://magcryst.org, which in addition to providing basic information about the commission and its activities, provides a flexible means of advertising and supporting a variety of conferences and workshops. In addition to specific pages for events organized, sponsored, or otherwise advertised by the commission, we also provide an extensive list of othe meetings where high-quality magnetic-structure research is to be presented (http://magcryst.org/meetings/).

In preparation for the International Year of Crystallography, the commission has organized a three-day workshop on “The Role of Magnetic Symmetry in the Description & Determination of Magnetic Structures” (http://magcryst.org/meetings/cmsworkshop2014). This sattelite meeting of the 2014 IUCr Congress will be held on 14-16 August 2014 at the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research at McMaster University, which is located in the city of Hamilton near Toronto, Canada. In addition to addressing the theoretical foundations of magnetic crystallography, the workshop will include hands-on software tutorial sessions and a number of applications lectures that demonstrate the effective of magnetic symmetry to simplify structural description and analysis. Eight of our commission members and consultants participated in a video conference on Google+ Hangout on 10 October 2013 to plan this workshop.

Professor Wieslawa Sikora (AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland) represented our commission on the International Program Committee of the 2014 IUCr Congress. At the spring-2013 IPC meeting in Montreal, she was instrumental in the planning of an impressive array of lectures and microsymposia related to magnetic crystallography (http://magcryst.org/meetings/iucr-congress-2014/). This will be an exciting and important congress for researchers in this field.

Commission members gave featured presentations, developed workshop components, and organized or hosted workshops and microsymposia at a variety of meetings in 2013. Some were not specifically organized under the auspices of the commission, but substantially furthered its objectives of promoting magnetic neutron scattering and magnetic structure determination.